Court: Feds can keep 'targeted killings' memos secret

Anwar al-Awlaki

A panel of three judges for the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York shot down a request from the American Civil Liberties Union to obtain access to memos on the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, saying the government has a right to keep the correspondences concealed.

Both the New York Times and ACLU wanted the memos, believed to contain illuminating information about the 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen that left al-Awlaki dead. The cleric was a U.S. citizen who joined al-Qaida in that country.

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Civil rights advocates called the deadly strike an outrage to the Constitution, saying al-Awlaki deserved the legal protections afforded all U.S. citizens. And both legal minds and the New York Times sought access to certain documents and memos that reportedly contained information about the military attack, via the Freedom of Information Act.

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The three-judge panel shut the door on those attempts, however.

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While the ACLU and New York Times argued the memos were "working law" and should therefore be released to the public, the judges disagreed.

"At most, [the memos] provide, in their specific contexts, legal advice as to what a department or agency 'is permitted to do' ... and its advice 'is not the law of an agency unless the agency adopts it,'" Judge Jon Newman wrote in the court decision, quoting portions from a 2014 federal court decision on a similar request for government information.